


All the Moths in Ithaca

by MumblingSage



Series: History, Tragedy, Lust [1]
Category: Coriolanus - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works, Βίοι Παράλληλοι - Πλούταρχος | Parallel Lives - Plutarch
Genre: Anger, Animal Metaphors, Character Development, Character Study, Conflicted Emotions, Erotica, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Grief/Mourning, Other: See Story Notes, Plutarch - Freeform, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, destructive impulses, identity crisis, references to Virgilia/Caius Martius, triumph, wing metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-17 15:56:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5876821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MumblingSage/pseuds/MumblingSage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even Penelope had other suitors. </p><p>Twelve days after Caius Martius' banishment, the lady Valeria comes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Moths in Ithaca

**Author's Note:**

> It's Femslash February 2016 and I am bouncing off the walls in excitement to post this. However, three brief content notes first:
> 
> One, spoiler warning and content advisory for the plot of Coriolanus. Two, food and eating issues: a character's negative emotions have an impact on her appetite, which is discussed at some length because of Coriolanus' passion for belly and appetite metaphors. The situation is resolved and does not, I feel, quite fit a "disordered eating" tag, but I did want to note it upfront. Third and finally, there is discussion for Virgilia's marriage and some physical intimacy with Caius Martius. There's a lot of different ways to read their relationship and in other fic I ship it as a genuine love match, while in this story it is a mutually respectful and mutually disinterested arranged marriage. 
> 
> Works cited are at the end of the story.

Anger devours; one cannot feed on it.

She should be hungry.

Restlessly, she paces from room to room and takes in the contents with a searching glance, like a starving woman seeking meat. But she does not look to the kitchens. Virgilia cannot even abide the smell from them. Her world is gray and all food is tasteless, too heavy to swallow.

Volumnia, her exiled husband's mother, dines at Menenius' invitation, hearing from him the latest proceedings in the Senate, both of them grinding rumor to flour between their teeth. Meanwhile Virgilia will not go out of doors. Like Penelope, they used to tease her. Spinning enough to fill Ithaca with moths.

Now they do not mention Penelope, who awaited a husband's return from war. And Virgilia is done with spinning, too restless to sit and twine wool into a starting length, then let the spindle's weight draw down, to feel the coarse rasp of yarn forming between her fingers. She is much too distracted to think of weaving or sewing, of shaping these tangles into something whole.

In the summer heat that smothers Rome like the breath of a dragon, she has cast off all the woolen and woven things from her bed. One drape still cushions it—the skin of a wolf, a creature  slain by Volumnia's husband, the elder Martius. Perhaps her own husband was conceived upon it; that would fit his nature. Virgilia lies there, without her husband, when pacing exhausts her.

Alone, she runs her tongue across her teeth and wonders at how clean, how sharp they feel. She turns her head to breathe in the rich wild smell of the pelt and feels a sort of solitary kinship. Somethings she thinks she could devour prey, that she hungers for the violence of tearing into something. To be capable of it. A way to vent this stewing, storming, helpless fear and rage.

Twelve days after Caius Martius Coriolanus' banishment, the lady Valeria comes to tempt Virgilia to eat. From her own kitchens, she brings a platter of favorite morsels: folded pastries packed with spices to stir her palate, cakes baked to melting softness, easy to swallow, and some savory delicacies, colorful and firmly raw, demanding her teeth. Virgilia tries each one to please her. Teased to life, her senses stir enough to make her smile at her friend. But her stomach fills quickly, and then she turns away.

Weight settles beside her on the couch; fingers press the corner of her mouth. "One more?"

She parts her lips to accept a bite, but after swallowing, she insists, "I have no appetite."

"Do you miss him?"

Her knuckles rub the wolf skin. "It has been a long time since he shared my bed." Not quite an answer—theirs had never been a marriage that could be summed up in bed—but it is not an answerable question. Virgilia fears to dig too deep for answers. She fears her own thinking, and so she speaks thoughtlessly.

Yet her words draw attention to the bedroom they are in, at the center of the house she has not left since her husband passed through the gates of Rome.

Her seclusion has not really been for grief. Virgilia fears the outside, the people she would encounter there. Their pity, their sneers—and what reply she might make to them. She fears what she might become capable of. Without her husband, she has become a strange in-between thing: not quite a widow, not quite in exile herself, not quite as one dead, but something like each of these things. Their son has been raised by Volumnia; Virgilia has barely been a mother. To Valeria she knows she is a poor friend, uncertain how to return her warm invitations when she feels so often incapable of warmth, even when she drains the heat into her and yearns to burrow in it like a blanket.

She has lost her precarious place in the world, and in losing her place, she has lost all boundaries. The walls of this house must serve in their place.

Valeria sets aside the platter, which shows hardly a gap for what Virgilia has eaten. "Are you lonely here?"

It is not quite the same question as she asked before.

And it too is frightening in its implications. Virgilia has always been lonely. A stranger in a strange family, with a strange husband—a man like his mother, both strong, ambitious, and violent, though never to her. He raged hotly in the forum, against plebeians and tribunes, but to her he has always been cool, perhaps careful. And she has accepted his respectful regard and his protection, solemn, silent. She was his wife, anyway, and that had been something.

Now he is banished, and she is nothing. A kind of nothing that lies beyond shame. She is lost, lonely, desperate. And if she ever gives in to that desperation—"Go," she tells Valeria. "Don't let me pollute your mirth."

"I have little mirth without you."

She shies from the words, instinctively. They're baffling. She is not used to being required, relied on—

—desired.

The thought touches something deep inside her, a bright glimmering something that has been buried in clammy dread and the sense of approaching doom. Since her husband's exile and her own unmaking she has only been marking time, to what she doesn't know; disaster surely. Desire belongs to hope, and she has no hope.

She and Valeria have been friends since they were girls together. It has been a friendship never quite free of desire, of awareness of the other's body, its strengths and beauties and the flaws that made it dearer still—bathing together, dressing together, trading scents and painting lips and combing snarls out of long, thick hair. Racing across the courtyard, when no one was around to see them run, admiring the whirl of her companion's limbs as much as the burn in her own. But it might never have involved more than admiration, except for this disaster that's befallen them.

Fingers brush her wrist, and she startles but it is not a flinch. She looks up into Valeria's face. Her dark eyes are deep with some secret strain. Compassion, for her, for shy and prickly Virgilia? Perhaps Valeria, too, feels the sense of things crumbling.

If there is not much time left, there is no need to fear the consequences.

 _Come then,_ Virgilia almost says, _wait for Ulysses with Penelope_. But they are not waiting.

And even Penelope had other suitors.

She feels no guilt as she wraps her hand over Valeria's and draws it to her body, guides it in a streak from the hollow of her breasts to the hollow of her legs, letting a line of fire fill the emptiness inside her. It feels right, like the fulfillment of a vow. Valeria's fingertips are smooth, and her touch is firm, with tenderness and no hesitation.

“Faithful friend,” Virgilia murmurs too softly for the words to be distinct, only the emotion with them, a cargo that almost breaks her voice.

She throws herself into that caress, and Valeria throws herself back. Like Ithaca, the room seems filled with moths—moth-soft hands, tracing moth-light against her skin and the linen covering it. Her body trembles; she feels her intimate core flutter like a pair of wings.

Hands clutch, hips meet, grinding against each other through their clothes. Cloth gets wadded between her thighs, blunting each thrust. It is frustration and encouragement at once, permitting her to move harder, to throw all her strength and restless energy into the actions of her body.

They reach climax before thinking to undress. Their writhing limbs rub the fur of the wolfskin the wrong way, so that afterwards, she can trace the patterns they made like a current in a silver river. A current that could drag away any moth foolish enough to settle on its surface.

Thrown into motion, she cannot stop again.

Her mad pacing resumes. She is not lost anymore; she is only outraged. They made her nothing. She wants to take everything back. She moves, searching feverishly, fueled by wrath churning bitter and wild inside her, waiting to be released. Waiting for something more than mere fluttering.

Yet she seems a moth, dull-colored and soft and tiny, compared to the forces that clash around her. The Senate and their wars. The people and their scheming tribunes. Her husband, and the armies he leads and shatters—first one and then the other. So rumor says, speaking of a meeting in the enemy's capital of Antium, calling vengeance-hungry Martius a traitor to Rome.

Despite rumor, Virgilia leaves her room, leaves the very house, following Volumnia to confront the tribunes who engineered their son and husband's exile. It feels as excellent as she feared, to let loose her rage and scream until they question whether she is of mankind.

They are right to.

She is woman.

Stripped of everything but her flesh and voice, she uses them both, throwing fists and threats together. It takes Menenius' intervention to stay her. The kindly senator tempts Volumnia, suggesting the rich delicacies crowding his table if they would sit down to it. It is not merely a meal he offers, but companionship, counsel in this trying time—but such companionship makes Virgilia's bile curdle worse than food does. Politics was never her business, nor her husband's. His work was war. _Is_ war.

Valeria can tempt her to part her lips, sometimes to swallow, but even then Virgilia burns meager fuel like a blazing furnace smelting iron for blades.

She thinks the starvation of this anger might kill her, thinks it without any fear.  

But she learns soon what form her death must take. She knows for sure when word comes confirmed of her husband—that he is in Antium, but he will return to Rome, and with an army at his back. That _he_ is the doom approaching.

Their son plays in the courtyard, drilling with a wooden sword and clay bullets. He has heard Rome is about to be attacked. No one has told him by whom. And Virgilia cannot, will not make him sit still. He likely would not heed her.

With despair comes gentleness.

For all her life Virgilia has embodied delicacy and silence. Perhaps she has been loved for it. She is delicate with Valeria now: not timid, but light in her sure touch, which skims lip and aureole and the passage of skin along Valeria's cleft. Feathering over all her limbs, where goose bumps form at the ticklish sensation. She knows where to press more firmly, and where to let just the edge of her nail trace. As though Virgilia can feel what her lover feels, all limitations of her senses dissolved.

The new sensitivity is not always a gift. She does not touch her sewing, with fingertips shy of the needle and with an odd fastidiousness, as if the pricking would hurt mute fabric.

Shyly, too, her fingers explore Valeria's most intimate spaces. They push hesitantly, making their tentative way in to where her body closes around them. Only when Valeria's sighs roughen, climbing higher, does softness cease. She knows the motions, tracing rapid circles inside her and out. Valeria's chest heaves, and Virgilia dips her head to sip at her offered full breasts. It does not take much thought anymore. There is only sensation: heat and closeness, the wet of dew and honey, and cries rising, rising, rising.

She is not silent, either. Valeria comes to her when no one else is in the house, and as Virgilia sucks her sweet nipples, digs her fingers into the curve of her hips, ruts against her hand between her thighs until she feels her climax peaking, she cries out from it. She screams, she roars, triumphant.

She claws at the wolfskin, pulling loose black and silver hairs. In abandon, free and fearless and furious.

Or else her hands are prisoners—holding Valeria's flesh as if unable to let go, clutching and only barely kept from bruising, the last of her control spent to make her fingers a little gentler. Their lower bodies join, rolling to meet each other, pleasure building with each pass of friction, an unconscious and helpless thing. She cannot direct it, and doesn't want to; she wants to lose herself in animal being. And not to be alone. She is not alone, when she and Valeria writhe and fasten together as if the salt-sweet sweat has stuck them.

Beneath the smell of sweat, she comes to know Valeria's perfume, a vibrant essence worn at her wrists and neck like a garland of flowers. Unguent sometimes makes her skin slippery, or sticky and sour-tasting. But Virgilia is not troubled by sourness, and she likes the scent. It is lighter than the musky incense Volumnia prefers, which cloaks the house in choking dignity, clinging at the back of the throat. Valeria's perfume, teasing with first-fruit mellifluousness, makes something take flight within her. Trembling breaths pull it down around her pounding heart as Virgilia presses her face against Valeria's shoulder, the crook of her arm, the valleys of her bosom and navel and lower folds.

She catches it, too, rising from the long hair that falls warm and heavy across her thighs as Valeria returns her kisses. Her tongue delves, discovers, circling wells and peaks of sweetness. She keeps faithfully at her task even as Virgilia's thighs lock around her, muffling and seizing tight against the motion of her jaws.

Virgilia thinks she can smell smoke in her own sweat, can feel the grit of ash across her skin and rubbing inside her lungs. Only it is not ash rough against her, but hairs torn from the wolfskin. She wears the pelt tangled in her curls, she knows. As if it grows there. The anger that fills her from gizzard to brain must come out somehow. Perhaps Valeria can taste it in her cunt.

But Valeria is clean, pure, like the fresh snow at the end of spring melting from a field where not even deer would walk. As if to cleanse her fingers and palms, Virgilia strokes Valeria's body—the skin beneath her breasts, ribs and ridges of bone; the column of her neck, and the fuzz of small short hairs at the back of it; the lighting-shapes that marked her when she grew to sudden height, ripples unlike the gentler, root-formed tracings at the sides of Virgilia’s belly; the round, plump undersides of her legs. Virgilia straddles her, sometimes with the hard bud at the apex of her thighs so swollen it brushes Valeria's skin through its chaperone folds, slicking the other woman with her outflow that dews and drips. She half expects it to lather as the pace of their lovemaking increases, as her sighs roughen to moans, scaling to howls, as she lets loose something even greater than her fury.

Her hands track up the ladder of Valeria's ribs to hold her breasts, as gently as gathering ripened fruit. She squeezes them as Valeria rises on her elbows, coming nearer to her. Virgilia bends to lick a nipple, then sucks harder when Valeria's fingers tow her hair. By accident, she catches the peak between her teeth, but Valeria's breath catches and she appeals, "Again."

As Virgilia nips the point, one of Valeria's thighs comes up, pushing against the space between hers. Though Virgilia spreads her legs to make room, Valeria keeps up the tempting pressure, firm but not in the right place. Until at last Virgila releases her breast and reaches down. Valeria's body draws her fingers in, a wet pull born of familiarity and desire. But she rides out just the first few strokes before turning, flipping Virgilia beside her, and reaching at last for the place she has addressed from a distance. She flicks the swollen rosebud nub, then nurses it with her thumb as two fingers slide back and in.

Their hands move in parallel, their trembling legs braced and interwoven. Gasping, Virgilia crooks her heel to press in the small of Valeria's back, and Valeria recognizes and answers the wordless demand for a kiss. All her life she’d never known what a kiss could be; Valeria has taught her what and how to make them. She falls quiet at last, as Valeria takes her breath and tastes and swallows it. As cries become another form of caress.

Her tongue and fingers and the whole hot weight of her body sate Virgilia in a way anger cannot.

#

Virgilia has become impatient with moths. She catches Valeria's lower lip between her teeth and drags hard at the flesh, urging her. Valeria meets the urging, and her nails furrow Virgilia's scalp as she pulls her closer. Her kisses, like her wetness, wash dread's claylike flavor from Virgilia's mouth. The red sting of her fingers pushing inside, two and then three, fills her, makes hours run together in a hot wash. Their hips and hands rock in time, while tongues seek, and yelps and sighs are swallowed back. Pleasure doesn't end, nor does desire or its pursuit. Bedding her becomes a perpetual spoil.

"Yes, more—" Panting the demand into Valeria's mouth, she spreads herself to receive another finger.

She hears, wry, "I don't have much more to give."

Valeria shifts her fingers, one after the other—all four of them. Virgilia's breath catches, and she fights back a shudder.

"Good." She sighs. " _Good_."

They share a gentler kiss, and then Virgilia lets her touch slide from Valeria's thick hair, down her neck where the pulse is hammering, over her tense shoulder and following her arm to the wrist of the hand before the core of her. It is slick with what flows there, and Virgilia's fingers slip as they close in a ring around it. "Move them," she whispers.

The fingers inside her, which she had urged to multiply, now spread. Breath comes in stops and starts as she absorbs the sensation, not pain but intensity. She is pushed to her boundaries from the inside. And she finds they are greater than she had imagined. She had heard whispers, so scandalous that she forgets their source, that a fist could be fit into that dark, tight space, but for the first time she can imagine it.

It's shocking, and sends veins of fire spreading through her. Hot and heady, a sweet familiar stretch and intimate savor. And then— a tiny pull too much, and it burns, just enough to hurt her, and to make her angry.

Good. Anger suits her, no stranger to it, after all; even in ecstasy, she feels ready to destroy the world, starting with herself if necessary.

But Valeria sees the twinge cross her face, and her fingers fold back, relaxing. Her other hand pets Virgilia's stomach, as if to soothe from the outside. She plants a kiss on her lips, dry and soft, powdery as a moth's wing.

Poor little moths they are, trapped in a city soon to be besieged, lost amid lions and dragons. Greater and warlike creatures. Smaller beings are doomed, like the butterflies her son chases down and rends with hands and teeth. He is like his father in that, everyone says so—but Virgilia's teeth grind behind the kiss, and she rocks against Valeria's hand, thinking of tearing, ripping, destruction with nothing but glorious excitement, approaching anticipation.

"Again," she says. "Valeria—love, please, again." 

Her fingers unfurl more carefully, with pulses of hesitation where they almost close once more. Like new wings—Virgilia can picture them—and then her nerves release in a burst, and she thinks of a chrysalis peeling, with all the fresh surprise of first witnessing such a transformation in her mother's garden. But now the transformation comes inside herself. This goes beyond discovering the width of boundaries; this transcends them.

One of her hands grasps for Valeria, finds her breast, fingers dimpling but not gouging the firm skin. The other falls to rest beside her on the wolfskin, and forms an agitated fist, fingers clutching and twisting, wiggling and stroking in sympathy.

She snarls when Valeria pulls back.

But her lover chuckles. "Now it's my choice how to have you," she says.

At first it sounds incongruous—as if they play a game, aimed for fairness—but it is what she wants, and Virgilia wants her. So she nods, permitting it. She moves as Valeria beckons her to, getting up, kneeling. And Valeria slides beneath her, pressing one hand to the small of her back, letting the other skim delicately over her folds just before they meet her mouth. Her fingertips press the small bud, circling, and her tongue pushes deep.

Virgilia rises over her. And rises, and rises. Whether moth or dragon, she has wings: more than some cringing, creeping thing. Dread is gone and anger falls below as she ascends. There is only—she cannot call it happiness, and even ecstasy seems too simple a thing, but it is very much like joy.

**#**

Martius may have been as absent as Ulysses, but he is not as subtle nor as crafty. Virgilia does not consider herself crafty, either; she mistrusts subterfuge.

Valeria makes her reconsider cleverness. Its attractions—the thrill of the unexpected but intuitively _right_. Its promise. How it might yet save them.

Valeria is the one who suggests they got to Martius, that he might be moved to mercy by the sight of his mother, Juno-like, unyielding and beloved, and by the child of his blood, and by his wife.

And because Valeria suggests it, Virgilia agrees. Because it offers a chance, and she finds herself hungry for chances.

Underneath all the churning anger with which she hides it, she finds what has been lurking,  bittersweet with desperation—she finds hope.

And so she follows Valeria's plan. Leads Valeria and Volumnia to meet her husband again. They ask a favor that might doom him in the eyes of his new allies (men she hardly dares look at, ancestral enemies bristling with blades).

When she kisses him, bittersweet as his exile, deep as his revenge, it is not because she seeks revenge herself. She has never hated him and does not now, any more than she has ever feared him or ever loved him. She does not reach out for the cool yet reliable respect they once had as if it were a weapon; she does not plead, berate, seduce him out of anger. Only hunger.

She wants to survive. She wants her family and Valeria to survive. She wants whatever life lies beyond this confused murk, beyond boundaries. And since she must save Rome to secure it, then she will.

And so she does.

So do they all.

He savors the kiss, as in a wistful way so does she. It’s a brush of warm life across their lips, and that warmth is what they both seek. Whether softened by it or by Volumnia's words, and the full force of woman's desperate resolve, he gives in. Agreeing to spare them.

Rome is not ungrateful. She and Valeria and Volumnia  return, bearing a treaty of peace, to strewn flowers and welcoming songs. Offered anything, they see temple founded at their request. The Fortune of Women presides over the Via Latina, raised in thanksgiving for deliverance.

But Virgilia's worship is of another kind.

She folds her arms around Valeria, presses kisses to throat and breast and thigh, and interspersed between them she whispers a hymn, praise to legendary Ulysses' patron, Minerva—

_Crafty one, She, with a heart relentless,_

_modest Virgin, Protectress of the city!_

And though her fingers may put the lie to _virgin_ , and though her whispers are high and wild, she does not blaspheme; none of the words are bitter or less than sincere.

She fears for a time that her anger will not go easily. Even now when she knows that, once she lets it go, there will be something left to hold on to. Her freedom comes to the test the day news comes of an attack in the senate at Antium—when she learns that Ulysses will not come home, ever.

She puts on the black widow's weeds that Rome's Senate permits her, and cries in Valeria's arms, and after an hour, the tears dry. It was the shock, she realizes, and whatever crumbs are left of tenderness and gratitude.

But she has tenderness and gratitude due to the living, too.

After the tears have dried, she remains in Valeria's arms.

Their restless limbs twine; her lungs are a furnace and their own bellows, and she has no need or reason to pace her rooms, now. She rises from bed clearheaded, like a woman cured of fever. Valeria brings a small meal and together they finish it, licking honeyed sauce from each other's fingers. She can sit still afterwards, and bend her head and let her spinning run through her hands. Her needle moves straight, and so does her shuttle. Valeria sits beside her, and sometimes their legs brush under the cloth taking form, or sometimes fingers meet.

And so Penelope sits weaving, and if Ithaca fills with moths or with the dust upstirred by other beating wings, it does not trouble her any longer. 

**Author's Note:**

> Sources and further reading:
> 
> Coriolanus by William Shakespeare, full text: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/full.html
> 
> The Life of Coriolanus by Plutarch (including background on Valeria's plan and the Temple Valeria and Vergilia build): http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Coriolanus*.html
> 
> The Homeric Hymn to Athena (several translations are out there, this is the one I referenced): https://lectiodivinapaganus.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/two-hymns-to-athena/


End file.
